McGoohan wins the candidates tournament, and becomes eligible to challenge World Champion Martin0 for the crown. If McGoohan and Martin are both ready, I can mod the game starting Tuesday, September 3. But Martin has the right to complete one in-process game before the challenge game begins.

Also note: I will be travelling from September 5-12, so there will probably be a pause in any games I'm moding. For new games that I'm moding, it might be better to start September 12 or later.

For a traditional reason with all championship games being with witch + guard, I'd like our game to be witch + guard too.

Maybe we can play with witch + spirit or some other combination in the future, just not a championship game or later rounds of a tournament.

As a side note, I think the guard is an interesting piece to play with. I still have a hard time figuring out the timing of when to develop it and I have probably moved it earlier than I should in some games, but it feels satisfying to use once it gets active.

The guard is a powerful piece and in my opinion is roughly equal to a rook on paper. I think the guard has high variance in its strength, more so than any other major piece. It's obviously very weak in the opening stages and is next to useless in some endgames, but when used well, it is huge. In my game vs auk, I found a guard + rook was more potent than two rooks. I would activate it as soon as possible, the only down side to doing so is that it isn't going to win a tempo in the early stages, while other pieces are much more likely to. Giving up a tempo when there's one available means developing the guard is difficult to assess.

@Martin0 I understand very well that you want to keep this combination witch + guard for the championship game and of course you can determine that. I just thought the spirit would be more inspiring for tactical possibilities and I've never tried this witch + spirit combination before but I think it would be very exciting. But maybe we can try that together sometime in the future.

ok, yeah maybe in the future. I don't want to make promises too much ahead of time, but I'll most likely be available after our game.

When it comes to witch + spirit, the combination has been used once and it was agreed that a possessed witch would still be unable to capture like a knight. The reasoning being that a witch is not supposed to be able to capture pieces and that combination would be too OP.